You Will Never Believe Until You Know

Our problem in our faith or our religiosity

is not one of information, but it's one

of motivation.

What do we do? Right? What are the

things that we need to kind of learn

or ponder upon or synthesize?

Right? Maybe it's not about just information. Maybe

it's just about synthesizing. Maybe it's about feeling.

Maybe it's about inspiration.

What do we have to do? Where do

we go?

And at Aragua Sojani, he mentions

that

we have to

increase our awareness in a couple of arenas.

First of all, we need to increase our

awareness of Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala.

Right? Somebody will never ever want to

adhere

to Allah's guidance if they don't know who

Allah is. That's just plain facts.

Right? That they don't know that Allah is

the most merciful.

Well, then how are they gonna trust that

Allah's rules are fair? They don't know that

Allah is the most wise. How are they

gonna trust in Allah's guidance?

They don't know that Allah

is able to

reward

beyond comprehension

and forgive beyond comprehension. How is this person

going to trust the system? Right? If if

Allah is just an abstraction,

a theory, an idea

without sort of a tangible

felt reality and I mean that in the

sense that, like, a person feels

feels that Allah exists,

you know, then who's going to want to

listen to this rule or that rule? So

the first thing is

increasing your knowledge about who Allah Subhana Wa

Ta'la is and not just knowledge in the

sense of information, but real

embodied

knowledge, feeling it, understanding it, all of your

senses involved.

And then after that, we also have to

understand who we are. That's probably the other

big point,

and that's what Raghu al Sahani mentions, the

author, he says, for first understand Allah then

understand yourself. What is what are we as

human beings?

What's our nature?

What's our potential?

What's our capacity?

If you think that we're all just damned

to go to hell from the first day

we come into this world or that we

have some sort of original sin hanging over

us, then it's gonna be really hard to

get that motivation up.

Why would you want to,

if

if getting into paradise

is only about Allah's grace and forgiveness and

has nothing to do at all with what

we do in the world, then why we

even try.

Right? We we act as if differences in

theology are just like differences in culture and

they're not. They actually result in different ways

of being in the world. They result in

different perspectives

and thus different actions

or capacities for action.

Somebody believes in original sin is not like

somebody who doesn't believe in original sin. In

Islam, we don't have original sin.

So we don't have that hanging over us.

Right? We we we're more of

a clean slate. Michael Law says in the

Quran, you came into this world knowing nothing.

We're more of a clean slate and so

that's

that's a much more encouraging starting point,

right, than the starting point of, well, you

have this original sin and you're hell bound

unless you

get baptized or accept Jesus or whatever it

is.

Right? So we have to know who we

are. What's what is the nature of a

human being? Right? What are the different things

that are common to all of us that

go inside of all of us? The the

urges, the motivations,

the delusions, the potential,

the potential for good and the potential for

evil.

What are all those things that that make

us up essentially? And the last piece of

the puzzle about us, so, you know, 2

main things: knowing a lot and knowing ourselves.

What's the purpose?

What's the point? Why are we here?

Okay.

I'm here. You're here. We have this urge

and that motivation and this delusion and that

ability and that potentiality

or this capacity, why? What's it all for?

And so if somebody can figure out those

2 things or at least develop themselves in

those two ways, their understanding of who Allah

is and their understanding of who a human

being is,

then we can

then we can go somewhere. Right? Then we

can do the work that

builds the faith,

strengthens the heart to the point where somebody

is actually seeking out Allah's guidance, ready, willing

says.

says.